Rewatching Mike Leigh's Career Girls and other ways to eke out some happiness

big pants, songs on tv, and a new relationship with nostalgia

The world is violent and ugly but also gorgeous and sublime (it took me three days to remember the word “quotidian” this is what I mean when I say I am illiterate) but guess what? Evergreen statement! Regardless I do think you often have the option if not the duty to try to eke out joy from wherever you see fit and in that spirit here are five things that brought me pleasure recently.

Mike Leigh’s Career Girls

A really good decision I made recently was to rewatch Mike Leigh’s 1997 movie Career Girls, which is a film about female friendship (a current preoccupation of mine, see recent examples Sorry Baby and the television show Dying For Sex, no passing the Bechdel test though which is absolutely FINE and honestly preferable, but we don’t have time to get into all that right now). The film follows the relationship between two women who meet when they become roommates while in college in the mid 80s; they are both spiky and twitchy and uncomfortable in their skin (who amongst us), one bolder and one meeker, and they both really love The Cure (again, whomst amongst us). There are two timelines depicted, the four years they lived together in their youth, and their reconnection for the first time at the age of thirty, grown-ups with smart little skirt suits and real jobs and the ability to finally put words to what their connection means to them. It’s really so great.

In addition to a great array of 80s Cure posters, the film features five tracks off the 1983 singles collection Japanese Whispers, plus (one of my very favorite Cure songs if anyone is asking) the 1984 track “The Caterpillar.” Leigh asked Robert Smith if he could include Cure songs in the film, and apparently he said yes on the condition that they be the only band featured in the film. I listened to part of an interview with Smith that year on Triple J while he was promoting the singles collection Galore and the first thing the interviewer asked him was how he felt about Career Girls. Smith said he had said yes (via fax!) to the request to use his music because he was a fan of Leigh’s work but had “mixed emotions about the film…I sat in the front row and had mixed feelings…I felt strangely unsatisfied at the end because I’ve been conditioned along with 99 percent of the rest of the population to expect some kind of Hollywood ending. He was actually there so I got to ask him some questions about it…He said ‘Life’s like that’ which I suppose is true.” Mike Leigh said “it do be like that sometimes.” And you know? He’s right.

The music featured in the new Lena Dunham show Too Much

I haven’t finished Too Much but so far I have been enjoying it, and have been particularly delighted and sometimes freaked out by the music. The Songs:Ohia moment? The 2002 Cam’ron album cut?? The Fray cover that caused me to write a meandering essay about god last week??? I did some journalism (aka asked a mutual friend, consulted Google, and tagged Good Thing Going the Substack account for Lena Dunham and Michael P. Cohen’s media company on here), and found out that the exquisitely chosen music is a result of the work of both music supervisor Iain Cooke (who also worked on season 6 of The Crown, and relevant to my interests, the Oasis doc Supersonic) and Lena’s husband and the show’s co-creator Luis Felber aka Attawalpa aka the original Felix.

HOWEVER the sublime bliss of Waxahatchee and Kevin Morby dueting on “You Found Me”? Pure Lena, a confirmed Fray fan. Thank god some people in tinsel town still have taste.

They also posted the playlist of the mixtape that Felix makes for Jess in episode 2, in all its glory (besides the emotionally devastating Songs:Ohia track, it also features Fugazi and Big Star? Bye). Also also sorry I literally had to run back and edit this post because I remembered the cameos from Carlos O’Connell from Fontaines D.C. and Don Fucking Letts!!! (If you don’t know who Don Letts I implore you to fall into a gorgeous little internet rabbit hole tonight or listen to The Slits or The Clash episodes of Bandsplain).

The instagram account 120revisited

The danger of nostalgia is that it can make you bitter towards the present but I think if you do it right it can just remind you of principles, frameworks, and aesthetics you’d like to carry through into your 2025 life (who was it who said that if you just put your phone away it’s immediately 2008 again?). In that spirit when I’m feeling down I often turn to the instagram account 120revisited, which posts clips of videos, interviews, and good old station IDs from the MTV late night alternative music show 120 Minutes, to soak up some of the feeling of (insert year here, the program was on from 1986-2003). A recent post that brought me an immense amount of joy was Lewis Largent interviewing Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins in 1993 where Guthrie is just a ball of squirming Scottish nerves who clearly would rather die than answer one single further question on music television. Or this absolute we used to be a proper country post about the 1995 KROQ Weenie Roast (I think about the band Sponge a lot which I think is totally normal and healthy).

The tracklist for the new Geese album

Obviously Getting Killed is a highly anticipated album for me as I won’t shut about it or them, but “Au Pays du Cocaine” is just a god tier song title. I also need to know what “Husbands” and “Islands of Men” sound like pretty soon or I’ll die?

These giant J.Crew pants

I just love large pants, not much more to it. The youth do not have a patent on small tops with big pants!!! The wider the leg the closer to god etc. These are men’s J.Crew.

Good luck with all your joy finding and pleasure seeking this week.